Editor's Introduction. Elements of Psycho-Analysis

In Elements of Psycho-Analysis Bion describes his theory of mental functions; the terms ‘function’ and ‘factor’ were an important part of Bion's thinking and working language, appearing first in his 1952 ‘Group Dynamics: A Re-View’,1 and receiving a more detailed treatment in the first chapter of Learning from Experience (Volume IV).

Elements of Psycho-Analysis contains the first published account of Bion's Grid. This was intended by Bion as a mental exercise for the analyst to subject his or her observations to a systematic categorization, not while with the patient, but outside the session – reminding ourselves of Darwin's dictum that judgement obstructs observation. Regarding this, Bion had taken to heart Darwin's remarks, in a letter he (Darwin) wrote to Thomas Henry Farrer on 19 May 1868, concerning an error Darwin had made in relation to a structure observed in an orchid: “It is a fatal fault to reason whilst observing, though so necessary beforehand, and so useful afterwards.”

In the session itself the analyst is making use of intuitive observation to consider not only the content of the communications made by the patient, but also the uses to which they are being put, moment by moment. In order to aid thinking after the session – the ‘home work’ – Bion worked out his own system of classification, “to aid in developing capacity for such instinctive decisions and have embodied it in the Grid”.2

Bion presented his Grid as a device for sharpening his capacity for clinical observation, and for sorting some of its products. He

thought others might make use of it, or else create their own. Bion was concerned with the relationship between elements of psychoanalysis – abstractions with dynamic functioning, as Sandler (2005) has put it – and what he called ‘psychoanalytic objects’. He had used this term for the first t